Political commentary from the LA Times

Liz Cheney: My father would rather be fishing

May 12, 2009 | 7:40
am

For those who have been wondering why former Vice President Dick Cheney doesn't just go gently into the night -- or at least park himself at that undisclosed location for a while -- now comes the answer. Apparently he really cares.

Liz Cheney, the vice presidential daughter who got a plum job at the State Department during George W. Bush's administration, has taken to the airwaves to defend her father's rants. Ever since Barack Obama started initiating new policies -- closing Gitmo, ending torture -- Cheney has made the oft-repeated and truly incendiary assertion that Obama's policies are making the country less safe from terrorism.

Today on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Liz Cheneysaid her father would "rather be fishing in Wyoming" but felt compelled to tear down the Obama administration instead.

Her basic argument: Waterboarding was not only effective, it was legal, since the Bush administration had the legal documents that said so -- despite international conventions to the contrary.

Liz Cheney also accused the media of a double standard in criticizing her father over his outspoken views, noting that the media embraces former Vice President Al Gore when he speaks about global climate change. "You want him [Cheney] to shut up because you disagree with what he's saying," she told the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, whose column this morning called Cheney "an Old Faithful of self-serving nonsense."

The Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist also asked this question:

Can't we send Dick Cheney back to Wyoming? Shouldn't we chip in and buy him a home where the buffalo roam and there's always room for one more crazy old coot down at the general store?

...silence during the recent debate over whether the "enhanced interrogation" methods they approved crossed the line into torture.

Not so Cheney, who has become a familiar face on the Sunday talk shows, spewing his critiques about the Obama administration, urging Republicans to recover politically by embracing the very Bush conservatism that cost them control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The vice president, Gibbs added, keeps floating ideas that "in many ways the last election was about and the last election rejected. They're essentially going forward by looking backward. If the vice president believes that's a way of growing and expanding the Republican Party, then we're happy to leave him to those devices."